The past two decades have witnessed a marked turn in the heritage management debate towards the social values of cultural heritage.

• Project Leader: Stelios Lekakis

This could be considered a result of several ongoing political, economic and post-modern processes, with significant impact on the theoretical appreciation of cultural heritage and criticism of the established management practices.

Although theory thrives, a few practical tools have been provided to meet this growing appreciation of the social values of cultural heritage, and cater for a more shared, democratic and empowering heritage management. 

This project aims to devise and implement a new tool for the engaging and sustainable management of cultural heritage.

Based on solid theoretical grounds, the RES.CO.PART tool will attempt to promote the efficient involvement of communities as stakeholders in decision-making processes for the management of cultural heritage in landscape.

It will combine interdisciplinary methods of mobile technologies, spatial analysis (especially Geographic Information System (GIS)) based Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) with research practices from cultural anthropology, attempting to retrieve and present ethnographic data to interested interlocutors.

The end product will be a modular, mobile application that could function as a probe for collecting ethnographical information and as a medium of presenting them, leading in more informed decision-making.

Areas of focus are two contrasting communities, Naxos in the Aegean Sea (GR) and part of the East Devon ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ (AONB) (UK).